Merry Christmas! OK, now that I’ve got you smiling and thinking of Santa and Elves and Snow flakes, Sugar Plum Fairies (hey, sugar, are you reading this?) and dancing gingerbread boys, let’s look at some of the more dangerous yet popular items from this blog’s past.Item 1: It is OK to be an atheist, but not an uppity atheist

When you get a chance (but not right now, only when you have absolutely nothing whatsoever else to do) have a look at Matt Nisbet’s latest thinly veiled attack on PZ myers*.

It is the usual crap. Atheists are not allowed to express annoyance, disgust, or anger, or to vilify, sillify, or nullify the religious, no mater how whacked-out those religious individuals are. If PZ reads this, he’ll probably …

There are a lot of Christians that I trust, and love. But that is because of who they are. If I just know that someone is a Christian, especially if they are the sort of person to wear their Christianity on their sleeve, uttering “praise god” and telling me “bless you ” and “I’m so blessed” and so on, then I tend to not trust them.

These days, many people say that race is largely a social construct; while it may have a place in describing the population genetics of some species, is not particularly applicable to humans. I’m one of those people. The race concept is generally inapplicable or at best misleading when used as it often is with our species. This is why race should be abandoned in favor of other ways of describing human variation.

At the same time, there are political, social, and pedagogical reasons to …

Rather than give you the opening paragraph or so of this post, I’ll just send you there to read the comments. The post itself is of no consequences. It’s almost as though I typed nothing other than “Misogynist? Discuss!” The patterns of sexism and hatred, not to mention dogmatic ignorance, exhibited in this sequence of missives will some day be a masters thesis for someone … You perhaps?

Sometimes a retrospective is when we take the things we wish never happened, that we wish would just go away, and drag them out so we can remind ourselves how much we wish they never happened and to help us continue to wish they would go away.

Just so you know, over the time since Your Not Helping melted down, I’ve gone from being sorry for “Tom Johnson” to a sense of utterly indifferent but indelible disdain. Never before said aloud (by me): There was a time when we (we who were communicating secretly about him) were pretty sure he was suicidal. That is the only thing that kept any of us from revealing his true identity to the world. Looking back, I’m now pretty sure he was manipulating us. Christmas is said to be a time of forgiveness and brotherly/sisterly love and all that shit. I don’t buy that. Just stay off my part of the Internet, “Tom Johnson” and I won’t do bloggy harm to you. Otherwise I’ll kick your ass. Have a nice day.

Merry Christmas, every body! Happy Holidays, Bill O’Reilly! The next few retrospectives will be more up-beat, and oriented towards science, politics, and skepticism.

By Other Blog Is…: The X Blog

Here’s a great video on improving the history of graphic presentation and the effort to improve graphic visualization. It is from Better Figures, which is an actual web site with the subtitle “Constructive criticism of the graphics of climate science.” But I think the basic ideas discussed on that site and in this video are […]

From the Yale Climate Connections, a brief interview with Michael Mann. Global warming can cause record winter storms. It may sound counterintuitive, but it’s no snow job. When the oceans warm, more water evaporates into the air. MANN: “And what that means is there’s more precipitation. Water is cycling more vigorously through the atmosphere, and […]

It is estimated that when batteries approach $150 per KWh, the cost of all electric cars will become similar to gasoline driven cars. Since electricity itself is cheaper than gasoline (per distance driven) this would make electric cars a very good idea. Converting fossil fuel to electricity to run a vehicle is more efficient than […]

I am not an expert on Search Engine Optimization but I’ve been messing around with it a bit lately and thought I’d pass on a few tips. These tips relate to both SEO (Search Engine Optimization) proper, which means helping people find your blog posts, which, in turn, means hyping up your Google Juice, as […]

From NPR: Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the Democratic leader in the Senate, said he won’t seek re-election next year. “My friend Sen. [Mitch] McConnell, don’t be too elated. I’m going to be here for 22 months,” he said referring to the Senate majority leader from Kentucky. “And you know what I’m going to be doing? […]

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